Jarin

*snip* nevermind

Ahhhh, okay. Glad I wasn't an idiot that flubbed the install, then.

Okay, I had those. The weird part was that I was getting the toolbar controller info pop-up when launching a new game, but didn't have the icon. A clean download and reinstall of the both of them fixed the issue.

KEI doesn't seem to load for me. Or at the very least, I can't figure out how to activate it. I thought it might just not load in an existing save, so here's a new one:

If the helmet texture were more than just unpatterned noise, it would probably look better. Body and pack look great though.

Yeah, I just wanted to see what I could manage with "stock" first. Just stuck 8 mainsails on a rough framework.

The real trick is staying within the atmosphere while at solar escape velocities.

From the stock speed challenge experimental science I participated in... cheating heat and infinite fuel means absurd speeds, because infinite fuel cheat means infinite intake air. I think I'll break my needleflyer back out and see how it does under the challenge conditions. Edit: wait... no need for airbreathing engines, per rules... All that matters is TWR... oh dear.

My general opinion is a vague preference for an official reskin, but that's only because I know just how half-assed my recolor was. (seriously, it was a green and orange box overlayed on the base texture and set to "multiply" in photoshop; that's basically it).

Best addition

Addon to mini-rant: it doesn't even bloody surface attach properly, and the lack of radial symmetry means shoving stuff into the shelving with the offset tool just leads to unbalanced rockets. /rant Yeah, the new service bays... I am not a fan.

And here I was coming to apologize for not having anything to show yet on original skins for these over the weekend, and then you just go and just knock them out with a config. Looks better than I would have expected with the resize, too. Very nice.

I'm glad people like them! You really have to understand the level of cheating I did here, though. I just created a flat square texture on a scratch file of the gray and the orange, then copied that in a square onto a new layer on top of the existing image, <ctrl-t>ransformed the box into whatever shape needed the new color, and set the layer to "multiply". It's the digital equivalent of putting colored shrink-wrap over something. They look good largely because I could retain 90% of the detail of Porkjet's work. The most actual "artistic" work I did was erasing the black stripes and making that area flat white on the base skin before applying the overlay.

Falls into the same category of work as the reskinned 3.75m tanks. I.e. "when I can do original art for it" because the current texture isn't licensed for me to edit the way I did the porkjet parts. Basically, I'd love to, but it's probably going to be a while before I get to that point. If someone with skills for original texture work (rather than just editing like I did) feels like volunteering, that might be different. Otherwise we get to wait on my slow-ass learning curve.

This was actually an intentional change, but was undermined by my borking the normal map hard. I had intended to remove the normal ridges on the far left of the largest tank, and only have ridges on the orange section of the second-smallest (FL-T200). But since the map borked, @Snark had to stick with the original porkjet normal map, so you have ghost ridges that only exist in the bump mapping and not the texture file. The stripe on the 400 was also removed because the coloration went weird with the orange skinning. Fixing that is on the to-do list, but I can really only scrounge modding time on Saturdays right now, so it's going to have to wait for the weekend.

Okay, filing that under "to-do once I think I can actually create original textures" I guess.

Okay, seeing those side by side, next to the orange... I am totally seeing now why @OhioBob called that green. Darn contrasting colors.

MY gif maker fails at compression, so here's a 5.6mb rotating tank animation.

For proof of concept I have recolored... Half a tank. Yeah, I might have misjudged which part of the texture file covered what part of the model. But hey, it works! There we go, much better.

To clarify, I do appreciate the offer of assistance. But this being my first actual foray into KSP modding, I want to start simple.

I think I'm going to stick to editing existing textures rather than try to create entirely new ones, for now. For the rest, I defer to @Snark

It sounds like we're not going to need actual new models, just the image textures. The config should allow the new texture file to be applied to the existing models. If you have experience with turning blender models into parts though, I may have some questions for you soon.

I'll be starting with the black/orange, but assuming that I can make those look not-horrible (far from a given at this point), I'll certainly look at doing the same for all color schemes. Long-term I'd love to be able to have multiple matching color schemes for most tank and structural parts.

Best possible news to see first thing in the morning. Thanks!

I'm fairly confident in my ability to at least do the image editing part; especially since I can (if I understand you correctly) just blatantly steal the base color and texturing from the existing orange/black .dds texture files on the new parts. The one thing I'm worried about is a mention I saw of the 1.41 part tools not being released yet. Might have to wait on that?